Link Building Guide Part 6 - Flickr

Note: Flickr now nofollows all external links

Welcome to part 6 in my 2008 link building guide, I’ve got plenty more good techniques to go & this one is one of my favourites. I’m sure you’ve stumbled across Flickr at some point or another. Basically it’s a photo sharing community. You can upload photos, share them, people can comment on them & you can also start groups to collect pictures of certain photo types that you like.

Before I begin, I must stress that Flickr doesn’t really like you doing anything of a “Commercial Nature” & if they consider that you are, your account will be disabled. So before embarking on any of the techniques I do recommend keeping separate accounts for each (that way if you get busted for one, you don’t lose everything).

There’s three ways that we can build links via Flickr:

Upload Photos: Whenever you upload photos you’re able to add a brief description. Say you run a website about ipods, upload a few photos of your ipod & link to your website with the relevant anchor text. I managed to upload pictures of about 60 products I was selling on one of my affiliate websites but then had my account disabled. The key to this technique is to make your photos not appear to be “selling anything.” One thing you could also do is just upload photos as normal then write a long description, linking back to your various sites.

Here’s an example of the above technique:

You’ll notice in the above photo it doesn’t look like I’m trying to sell something, but instead I’m simply referencing some equipment I have in my studio (which happens to link to my own site).

Groups: Creating a group around a particular topic is another good way to snag a few high quality links. Lets say for example I have a site dedicated to credit cards, I could simply create a group that collects pictures of credit cards. You can add links back to your site in the About Group section. The more people you recruit to your groups the more link love that main page is going to get (with all the profiles linking to it).

Comments: This is by far the most lucrative way of getting a LOT of links. Whenever you have a few groups set up try commenting on a photo by hitting the Invite this Photo To link. You’ll see something like this:

Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Pink Furry Widgets, and we’d love to have your photo added to the group.

These comments can normally go pretty much undetected, since people use them so much. So simply adapt the phrase to link back to your own sites. Like this:

Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Pink Furry Widgets, and we’d love to have your photo added my Affiliate Marketing group.

You’ll notice that I’ve added a sneaky link with the Affiliate Marketing anchor tag into the phrase. Very very sneaky sir.

Be careful with this technique, remember to link to deep pages, vary your anchor text & don’t spam! Keep it on topic.

Finally, if you’re looking for the best Flickr photos to comment on then it’s naturally the ones with the most backlinks. I normally use digg to find the most popular flickr photos (if they’ve been dugg chances are they’ll have some decent backlinks too). Here’s the query:

Now start making some money.

Been enjoying this series? Show some love by linking to the Earners Blog 2008 Link Building Guide.